Novell GroupWise Buzz

We have more than 5,000 users, and we've done three successful migrations from Exchange to GroupWise. What's my favorite feature? That's like asking me which breath of air I prefer. Multiple signatures, calendars, ability to see the message source without having to maneuver like an Outlook user. Little server downtime for the end user, ability to move a user from one post office to another without the client getting screwed up, user managed distribution lists. I manage the 5,000 accounts, 15 post offices, five MTAs and two GWIAs by myself. I'd have to clone myself at least few times if we successfully migrated to another system. It's not that I'm that efficient-GroupWise is.- Paul Caron, Maine Medical Center, United States

We have about 4,500 GroupWise users, and only one administrator. It is a four domain setup, running all on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, including GroupWise Mobile Server. Favorite feature, hands down, is the stability!- Daniel Bray, Health First, Inc., United States

The hospital has 8,000 employees. There are 9,000 e-mail boxes, and I'm the only GroupWise administrator.- Eddie Munoz, Scott and White Hospital, United States

I really enjoy sharing with users the many options available in GroupWise, such as setting up rules. GroupWise is very user-friendly. I used to work with Lotus Notes. GroupWise is much easier for users to get comfortable with.- Amy Mills, Longmont United Hospital, United States

Currently our agency has about 110 GroupWise users, supporting the public across eight counties with a population of about 158,000. GroupWise has always been up to the challenge of handling our e-mail and scheduling needs for this population. We receive about 12,000 e-mails a week, and our virtualized NetWare/GroupWise servers never let us down. GroupWise has saved our agency from at least four or five e-mail worms that caused great havoc for other state agencies that were running Exchange.- Matt Merrell, Southeastern District Health Department, United States

Since we migrated from Outlook to GroupWise, we do not have helpdesk calls anymore. GroupWise is a very stable product.- M.C.W. van Dijk, Rademaker, Netherlands

We spent all our money on trying to get Microsoft Exchange running, abandoned the project and implemented GroupWise.- Jay Muraglia, Base2 NC, Inc., United States

In our 10 years of using GroupWise, it has never once become corrupt, suffered downtime or disappointed. With its versatile deployment options (WebAccess, remote, caching or direct), I have been able to meet the needs of all our users. I have three favorite features: 1) Proxy access-try that with Exchange! 2) Find-powerful, fast and accurate! 3) No viruses-can Outlook say that?- Roger Anderson, Aerospace Distributors, United States

I support nearly 200 users, about half of which are permanently 'on the road.' That makes my favorite feature of GroupWise the caching mode. Some of my mobile users have mailboxes over 6 GB in size, and it just works. I've heard so many stories about other products falling apart when mailbox sizes get around 2 GB that I don't even want to consider the alternatives.- Farren Constable, The Computer Shed, United States

During the past 17 years, I've administrated GroupWise systems that have included as few as 10 users to groups that included more than 10,000. Throughout the years, my favorite feature of GroupWise has always been its total impenetrability to viruses and Trojans. I've worked with many folks who run other mail systems, and they are always chasing outbreaks. With GroupWise, that just does not happen.- Alan Russell, Leon County Board of County Commissioners, United States

I have been working with GroupWise for about five years, and I currently support approximately 130 users at this time. My favorite GroupWise feature is its resistance to virus attacks. It's also much less demanding, in terms of administration, than Exchange. You start it up, and it runs forever with no upkeep. It is the most trouble-free e-mail system I have used.- Troy Chappell, Hospice and Palliative CareCenter, United States

We have approximately 100 users locally and remotely using GroupWise, and we don't have the headaches that most Exchange users face, thanks to Novell's strides in making GroupWise a very robust e-mail system.- William Miller, Daniel Coker Horton and Bell P.A, United States

AVJennings is a 400-user GroupWise customer with more than 11 years of service. My favorite features? From my administrator point of view, that would be the solid and easy-to-maintain back end. As a user, it would be the Sent Items control (e.g., message status, notifications and retracting), and GroupWise Find.- Scott Moreman, AVJennings, Ltd, Australia

We're a health care organization, so we're pretty conservative when it comes to installing new products and technologies. For something like GroupWise, we'd normally wait for the first service pack before we install it. However, our CTO called us up and asked when we were going to install the beta. He must really want it.- Daniel Haun, Adventist Health, United States

Our organization has been using GroupWise for as long as we know (guessing around the turn of the century). My favorite feature has to be Proxy! It is very smooth and quick to get to other mailboxes. As an admin., I love running GroupWise on Linux. I also love my user experience, because I am not just an admin., but a user, too!- Joe Longmont, United Hospital, United States

We were forced by our President and CTO to change our e-mail system from GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange. We installed GroupWise 7 with an Exchange connector to compare GroupWise and Exchange and proved to them how risky it would be to change to Exchange. Finally, we succeeded in convincing the president to approve GroupWise as our e-mail system in the college.- Sandra Yeung, Grant MacEwan College, Canada

I have been working with GroupWise now since 2000. My favorite feature of GroupWise is the Proxy access feature. The one experience that will always stay with me is the time I migrated four huge post offices and two mail domains to a brand new hardware cluster. Another twist in the project was that I had to migrate the system from GroupWise 6 to GroupWise 7. I began the migration on Friday evening at 6:00 p.m. The migration failed at 7:00 p.m. After going through two nine-hour Novell Support Engineer shifts, I was able to graft the domain into the tree and bring all the post offices up successfully.- Calvin Peebles, EDFund, United States

My favorite part of GroupWise is the user recovery program. We had a user who was deleted by accident because the user name was very close to one that had left the company. We were able to recover the user without the painstaking process of building another post office and recovering from a backup.- Jerry Piper, Hamilton County Juvenile Court, United States

I have worked with Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise. I even hold several Microsoft certifications. Yet I will always pick GroupWise. It's got a great set of features that don't require years of experience to get a good grasp on. It is not complex for someone to set up or learn, which is important considering that you often find products that require extensive training and other products to make it work like it says 'on the box.'- George A. Passantino, Jr. Crain Communications, Inc., United States

I currently support about 2,200 users. Given the large volume of mail that is processed, I am constantly impressed by how consistently GroupWise handles the flow of messages.- Margaret Victor, AAI Corporation, United States

Last year I started working in the IT department at the hospital. The GroupWise server was one of the most stable Linux servers we had. Without much training I was able to learn a lot about GroupWise, knowing that there was even more to learn. The hospital supports more than 1,500 users, each with a GroupWise account.- Randy Weaver, Longmont United Hospital, United States

We are strictly a GroupWise organization. GroupWise is the most mission-critical application in the company. It's the first application to open in the morning and the last application to close at night. We have 3,500 employees who use GroupWise and a roll out of a new product is always a hard task due to training. We have only two people who support GroupWise (hardware, software and security).- Alex Korkishko, Weber School District, United States

We have been running a large GroupWise system for more than 15 years and are staying on the cutting edge. WebAccess is our favorite feature with more than 150 users connected at all times. We have more than 15,000 e-mail accounts and are rapidly expanding.- Dwayne Rawlins, University Health Systems, United States

We have been using GroupWise for more than nine years now. It has served our system well supporting about 2,000 teachers and administrators. I especially love the way it integrates with the Novell or AD database to allow collaboration with my colleagues. We are looking forward to Version 8.- Brent Joseph, St. Landry Parish School Board, United States

GroupWise is the backbone for our college. All faculty and staff currently use GroupWise for all their e-mail communication. Personally I've worked with GroupWise e-mail for my entire IT career, and I take a lot of happiness in that I've never had to deal with Exchange and Outlook. I'd say GroupWise is the best e-mail solution for its scalability and the ability to maintain with minimal effort. Once you set this one up right, it will go forever.- David Hoover, Fayetteville Tech Community College, United States

I have been working as one of our e-mail administrators for the last year. We currently have 3,500 users on 12 post offices. My favorite feature would have to be its ability to operate in a Linux environment.- John Masgalas, Summit Health, United States

We are a private high school with 640 students. I teach three classes, coach, and am in charge of all the technology. I am very busy and I don't have time to waste with buggy, insecure software that takes constant tending. GroupWise is great.- Matthew Schlawin, Fox Valley Lutheran High School, United States

My ambitions have always been to give our users a stable mailing system with the nice side effect of a low administrative effort for us administrators. After my first installation of a GroupWise system, I discovered that GroupWise had far more to offer than just mailing. I discovered how easy it is to maintain GroupWise. The users like the business focused view of GroupWise without the heavy feature overload other groupware solutions have, which no one really needs. As from the administrator point of view, I can say that we never really needed more than one GroupWise administrator (me!). GroupWise just runs and runs and runs!- Peter Wachs, Inform GmbH, Germany

In our experience, Novell products have been solid and the least worry of our daily operations. We always upgrade to the latest version of GroupWise and enjoy the latest features and stability, unlike the other IT groups we work with, who use Microsoft Exchange. We have never had any downtime due to GroupWise upgrades. Even when we moved our GroupWise system from a physical system to a virtual environment, we were up and running within 24 hours.- Charles Mendoza, Adventistrisk Management, Inc., United States

Our school has 550 computers for a student population of 1,300. From internal e-mail, external e-mail from our community, or scheduling resources within our school, our GroupWise system gets quite a workout with the 190 mailboxes that we have. My favorite feature is the reliability of GroupWise. Knowing that our GroupWise system is running like a top day after day, is like what the MasterCard commercials say, 'Priceless.'- Scott Leonard, LaSalle-Peru High School, United States

GroupWise is by far the most stable and powerful e-mail platform on the market. It is also the most versatile being able to run on top of Windows, Linux or NetWare. Also, GroupWise, out of the box, has the ability to handle hundreds of thousands of pieces of e-mail per user. You don't have mailbox size limitations and you aren't forced to install an expensive archiving solution either. We are extremely happy since the costs of GroupWise maintenance are much lower and the reliability, security and robustness are much higher than other groupware competitors.- Chris Cardillo, Kozyak Tropin and Throckmorton, United States

Currently I have about 75 users in one post office. We may be a small office, but our e-mail system is just as important as any large company's. The best feature of GroupWise, hands down, is the reliability. It works, and it works well. I laugh every time I hear about someone having to deal with another e-mail system.- Matt Beckstrom, Lewis and Clark Library, United States

During the past year we've been busy training various departments on how to use GroupWise calendars for department-wide functions. It's really helped them to consolidate their scheduling needs. As the administrator, I can't say enough about the stability of our e-mail system.- Alan McCain, Cedarville University, United States

Years of frustration managing Exchange finally came to a grinding halt when we learned that our Exchange server was suffering from a virus. After scrambling to get Exchange back up, I started looking for alternatives; enter GroupWise. We migrated all 80 users to GroupWise and we also removed six Windows servers and replaced them with Novell Open Enterprise Server (Linux Kernel) servers! I'm happy to say that after two years, GroupWise and Open Enterprise Server are still running perfectly without all the hiccups we were used to while managing Exchange.- Mike Treas, RMC Constructors, United States

We have been working with GroupWise since 1995, and we support over 500 users. Our favorite feature is how stable GroupWise is. It is the best!- Bill Pournaras, Netsphere, Inc., United States

I have been working with GroupWise for 13 years and we have 500 users with two domains and three post offices. I really like the reliability and resilience of GroupWise. The built-in security and not having to worry about viruses is great.- Dustin Hurshman, City of Thousand Oaks, United States

We currently have approximately tens of thousands of GroupWise accounts divided in to four post offices. Our ACS post office alone has over 30,000 users. Now, of those accounts, only about 1,500 are active, but we run that post office on a workstation we converted to a server. No blazing fast box connected to a SAN. A P4@2.6 GHz with a gig of RAM, and we never receive complaints about speed or access time. All of this is managed by a single administrator, me. Because GroupWise has been so reliable, I actually have time to do the rest of my job.- Joseph Zitnik, Henry Ford Community College, United States

My school district has been using GroupWise as its e-mail client since the summer of 2001. We have approximately 120 users, including professional and support staff. The features that are available, such as facilities management and e-mail accounts for all our students, are just the tip of the iceberg of what I would like to make available to our school family. Our 700 plus students deserve the opportunities to participate in the 21st century with all the technology skills possible, and having their own e-mail accounts gives them the start they need to become cyber-communicators.- Mitch Patri, School District of Manawa, United States

I support more than 600 users on GroupWise and use it in a variety of ways. I use the Resource function for reserving all county conference rooms, the auditorium and training rooms, as well for tracking IT computer equipment. I have also set up multiple document libraries for various departments. In addition, the calendaring and shared calendaring functions make it easy to unify the five county commissioners schedules. I have even integrated BlackBerry Enterprise Server with GroupWise for the commissioners' and employees' BlackBerrys.- Ty Fuqua, Charles County Government, United States

I administer a small group of about 70 GroupWise users at Texas A&M University. My favorite GroupWise feature is the checklist-I don't know how I ever did without it.- Ellen Provin, Texas A&M University, United States

We have been using GroupWise since 1996, and have nothing but good things to say about it. One of the best things about GroupWise is that it you turn it on and it works! No patches, no reboots.- Melville Pereira, Pollard Windows, Inc., Canada

At Southern Regional Medical Center we have more than 1,500 users. I come from a background using Microsoft Exchange, and I originally thought that the transition I would have to make to GroupWise would be untenable; however, the ease of getting into GroupWise administration has been a pleasant surprise. Due to the intuitive controls of GroupWise, I've been able to ease into GroupWise administration, self-learn the ins and outs of the system and even implement BlackBerry Enterprise Server for Novell GroupWise.- Michael Johnson, Southern Regional Health System, United States

Last year I went to a training for another vendor's product. During the class I found out that many people in the class were using Exchange in their businesses. There were several discussions about what Exchange could and (mostly) could not do: withstand viral attacks, archive, automate database repairs and clean-up, etc. All the while, I was smiling knowing that GroupWise already does these things. We have used GroupWise since the WordPerfect Office 3.0 days, and it just keeps getting better!- Scott Caldwell, City of Independence, United States

My organization has benefited from using GroupWise since 2001. Our campus has always contained a mix of users who prefer to use their own workstation OSs or e-mail clients. GroupWise has managed to consistently appease all these parties, with solutions that bridge the Microsoft, Apple and open source platforms. The product's ability to be flexible and more easily managed has made GroupWise the e-mail solution of choice for our campus.- Roger Dills, The College of Wooster, United States